16GB of RAM but only 256GB of SSD flash storage. Not a very balanced ratio, but couldn’t get a 512GB disk when needed a new Macbook. It turned out recently that I passed 1M files on my disk! Did some cleaning with limited improvement. Only after some radical decisions I was able to raise the amount of free disk space from 4GB to 40GB, a sufficiently safe percentage out of the total capacity.
Then I decided to test JetDrive, an SD like card promising SSD comparable performance, adding another 128GB of space to my Macbook. This tiny card fits into the SD slot and – as expected – is seen by the Mac OS Finder as a separate storage unit of decent capacity, a 50% boost to my overall internal storage space.
Strategizing on optimizations. I came to the conclusion that the best solution would have been to store on this card files I need to have with me, but not necessarily vital and indispensable. That was my generic definition of what I intended to park there. What would match that definition? Music – my Apple iTunes library – was my best answer. Currently 30GB, of personal data I could move from the SSD internal drive to a slightly less performing unit without any real impact. In addition and despite subscripting to iTunes Match, the extra room provided by the card allows me to download other thousands of purchased songs without risking to ever face a space crisis as happened before.
No one-size-fits-all. So far pleased with the benefits generated by a relatively affordable investment in extra hardware. There’s though a stringent intrinsic limitation in this product: hardware specificity. Before buying this card you need to know precisely what generation of Macbook you own because this unit has some hardware specific dependencies (scroll down in the link provided above to get to the official table containing specs). This means my card is not “portable” to any other previous or future Macs, quite annoying considering I regularly update to a new computer on average every 18-24 months.
